Bitter foes set to meet
The two figures at the centre of the civil war that has ravaged South Sudan are set to meet for the first time in nearly two years.
Ethiopia, which has helped broker the meeting, says rebel leader Riek Machar, who fled South Sudan in July 2016, is expected to meet face-to-face with the country’s president, Salva Kiir.
Machar had arrived in the Ethiopian capital yesterday morning for the talks, Menasseh Zindo, a senior official in his Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in Opposition (SPLM-IO) rebel group, said.
A foreign ministry spokesman confirmed his arrival.
Kiir arrived in Addis Ababa yesterday afternoon, according to the Ethiopian prime minister’s chief of staff, Fitsum Arega.
The official scope of the talks is broad – to build bridges between the two.
But analysts say that the outcome remains unclear given the leaders’ notoriously volatile relationship.
Once comrades-in arms in the fight for independence, Kiir and Machar experienced a bitter falling out, a development that played a key part in the civil war that blights the future of the world’s youngest state.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and nearly a third of the 12 million population have been driven out of their homes, and many to the brink of starvation.
The two will meet at the invitation of Ethiopia’s new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who also chairs the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) regional bloc that has taken the lead in thusfar fruitless peace negotiations.
“Abiy will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan and relieve the burden of death and uprooting of South Sudanese people,” Ethiopian foreign ministry spokesman Meles Alem said.
A landlocked state with a large ethnic mix, South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 after a long and brutal war.
But in 2013, Kiir accused Machar, his vice-president, of plotting a coup against him, and violence erupted between the two factions, feeding on brooding ethnic tensions.
They have not met since July 2016, when heavy fighting in the capital, Juba, signalled the collapse of a 2015 peace deal and Machar fled to South Africa.